During the week here in Greece we are going to be working on the finishing touches to some very exciting, at least to me, new extensions for joomla. Over the next few blog posts I hope to be able to give some in-sight and teasers for you to wet your appetite.
Creating rich content on any site is difficult, especially if you want to maintain a house style. A CSS style sheet is great for consistent fonts and text sizes but ensuring that images are a uniform size, resource links are in the same positions etc is a different matter.
Sites with multiple authors have even more difficulty maintaining a house style and for sites I am involved with I usually end up producing a printed "house style sheet" containing things such as:
- thumbnail images are 200px square
- main images are 600px wide
- resource links bottom right of content
- embed video with this code snippet
- add gallery with this code snippet
- etc...
Everyone has seen a web site with a beautiful design layout ruined by one author forgetting to re-size their images.
Or a site so inflexible in design and structure that every content category had the exact same layout irrelevant as to it's suitability.
And how many sticky notes have you seen with reminders of plugin code for galleries, videos etc.?
This new uber-extension replaces com_content with a powerful all-in-one rich content creator that lets the authors concentrate on content and leaves the joomla site to handle everything else automagicaly.
Throw in nested categories (no waiting for joomla 1.6), tags (no integration of another third party extension), comments (no waiting for joomla 1.6 or integration of another third party extension), embedded video and image galleries and a few more goodies and you have a whole new joomla.